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If you have If# bAdtCOSTA Resort-Club-Spa Carlsbad, California 92008 · Suite 501 provincial town where even a decent meal was hard to find. When the M.N.R. came to power in 1952, Bolivian mine owners had a bad name and the Bolivian mine unions were strong. Nationalization was in the air. It has been said that Paz hesitated over nationalization, but his hand was forced by Lechín and the unions, whose street fighting had done much to put him in power. So mine nationaliza- tion became the third big item in Paz's revolution, along with land reform and universal suffrage. There was a logical connection, for all three moves were aimed at raising the Bolivian Indians from their traditional inferior status Paz nationalized not only the Patiño mines but also mines belonging to the Hochschild and Aramayo fam- ilies, though these operators had better reputations and better labor relations. (He left man) smaller holdings, including those of British and Amencan com- panies, vv..,.. R. Grace among them, in private hands.) The nationalized mines were turned over to a state enterprise called Comibol-Corporación Minera de Bolivia-which had trouble from the start. One of its first problems was a sharp drop in the world tin price, to a level below that at which Bolivian mines could be profitably worked. I have heard this drop blamed on maneu- vers by the Patiño interests, which, no doubt foreseeing the inevitable, had for years before nationalization been taking capital out of Bolivia and investing it in the tin mines of Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asia mines-in Malaya and Indonesia-are placer ones, easil) worked by dredging, and are well linked with the world market by nearby sea transport; Bolivia's mines, by contrast, must be worked through deep, difficult shafts and are far from any port. When the world price goes down, Bolivia has more trouble than usual competing with the placer-mining countries, and this happened now, whether or not Patiño manipulations were to blame. (The end of heavy fighting in Korea, and con- sequently of heavy United States tin stockpiling, may have done more to knock the price down.) In addition, the Bolivian mines, having been neg- lected for years, were desperately in need of new equipment and new ex- ploration, which the management couldn't afford-partIcularly in vie\\'" of the fact that Comibol's foreign- exchange earnings were expected to keep the M. .R. revolution afloat by paying for imports of essential food and other non-mining supplies. Furthermore, Comibol itself quickly developed all the inefficiency to be ex- pected of a huge socialized enterprise in an underdeveloped country, a good share of whose few technicians have left. White-collar Comibol jobs were handed out as plums to the M.K.R. faithful, and blue-collar jobs prolifer- ated in an orgy of featherbedding. Workers took to partying and politick- ing in the mines, trying to make up for their sufferings of the past. Some labor leaders, driven by their long experience of poverty, took to graft. Others took to waging factional warfare and certaIn Communist labor leaders took to snarling up Comibol deliberately, as a way of embarrassIng the govern- ment. The abuses varied from place to place, being worse in the old Patiño mines than in, say, the old Ara- mayo ones, but, by and large, demoralization and inefficiency were general. Philosophical differences lay behind the abuses. In the past, the Andean Indians had had a strong tra- dition of communal ownershIp; the earth and its contents had belonged to the people, to he used for the common good, or for the common glory through the adornment of temples and palaces. Then the Spaniards had come and ex- tracted the metals for their own pur- poses, justifying this, perhaps, by incom- prehensible talk of divine right. .L nd then people like Patiño had continued the extraction, justifying it by the rules of capitalism: Patiño, the rightful own- er, deserved his profit, and meanwhile the international market prices had to be met. Either way, the miners got only the crumbs left by an alien system. Now, however, the mines were theirs, as they properly should be, according to both the old communal beliefs, still held stubbornly by most Bolivian Indians, and the new Marxist ones, taught by the organizers. The concept of com- lTIunal ownership was interpreted lit- erally; there were stories of miners' re- fusing to dril1 at such-and-such a spot on the orders of a manager and insisting on drilling at another, because "the mine i<;; ours." According to the miners' system of beliefs, they shared their own- ership with supernatural powers embod- ied in deities called such things as Pa- chamama, Tío, and Diabbto. These beings could make veins peter out, and could help or hinder the finding of new ones, and they had to be propitiated by sacrifices. Once, when I was visiting a mine near Oruro, I came on a stone idol deep underground. It had confettI on it, and offerings of half-smoked cigarettes in its mouth "If the miners make a good find, they leave some of